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Movie Review: Octavia Spencer is Back in Oscars-Bait Fruitvale Station

When a low-key New Year's celebration turned out to be Oscar Grant's last moments before a police officer killed him in a Bay Area train station, Ryan Coogler decided that Grant's life—not his death—had to be dramatized and commemorated on film.

It's not unusual for a first-time filmmaker to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. But at 27, Ryan Coogler also snagged the Audience Award with his captivating feature, Fruitvale Station, then went on to win the Prize of the Future at Cannes. Being practical as well as talented, he was prepared in case the film bombed. "I still have my day job as a counselor at juvenile hall in San Francisco," he told Filmmaker magazine. "I work with at-risk kids, which is another reason youth-at-risk comes into my work."

It certainly does in Fruitvale Station, a gripping film rooted in a real—and needless—act of violence. Mere minutes into celebrating the New Year of 2009, a 22-year-old California man named Oscar Grant (portrayed in the film by Friday Night Lights and The Wire's Michael B. Jordan) was fatally shot in the back on the platform at Fruitvale, his Oakland stop on the Bay Area Rapid Transit train.

The evening's vibe had been so mellow that everyone in the train car, Grant included, started gently dancing to one passenger's MP3 player. But as Grant and his friends stepped off the train, transit policemen, responding to the conductor's call about a scuffle on the train, grabbed them, slammed them against a wall, and pushed them facedown on the platform. When Grant protested, the cop above him suddenly pulled out his gun and shot him in the back. Because Grant was lying handcuffed on the cement, the bullet ricocheted up through his chest and a lung, wreaking triple havoc. The cop who shot him appeared shocked, and he later claimed that he meant to use his taser.

"Most people have cell phones now with cameras," Coogler points out, and the train stopped at the platform was full of revelers. So images of Grant's death sparked outrage all over the country, and marches and demonstrations in Oakland. But it hit Coogler especially hard. "Being black and from the East Bay and close in age to Oscar and his friends, I didn't want to do a documentary, because time was short and these situations keep happening." Fruitvale Station opens with cell-phone footage of the actual killing, but what follows in this astonishing first film is not just artful but real art that takes us down to the very core of truth. The elements of the popular, gritty urban action genre featuring bad boys and worse cops were there if Coogler had wanted to employ them. Oscar's no altar boy; we briefly see him slogging through a two-year prison sentence for selling Ecstasy. But the real information is how angry and aggressive prison could be making him—enough so that his mother (Octavia Spencer) refuses to see him again until he's out. That's where the action really is in Fruitvale Station: not the street but the hearth, not focused on a drug dealer's fast money but on a manhood worth aspiring to.

Females are at the center of this film: Sophina (Melonie Diaz), the no-nonsense young woman Oscar loves but carelessly cheated on, and their little daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal, who effortlessly dominates every scene she's in). Jordan is a wonderful actor; just watching him lift up Tatiana and strap her carefully into the backseat of their car, you sense the quiet thrill it gives him to be a dad. Coogler got his own thrill when the cinematographer Rachel Morrison came onboard, and together they've made an unexpectedly beautiful film. But most of all, Fruitvale Station is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. And why not? The Bard produced his first tragedy when he was in his twenties.

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